The Internet facilitates the access of resources that are available on the world-wide-web. Many different types of services are available that provide access to the Internet. These services provide access to the Internet via various devices such as computers, mobile phones, etc. Mobile data services provide access to the Internet via mobile phones.
Mobile data services facilitate the access of Internet resources by mobile data service customers. Internet based resources that can be accessed by mobile data service customers via mobile data services include services such as world-wide-web services, email, VoIP, text messaging, etc. Mobile data services charge for the use of the services that they provide to mobile data service users.
Mobile data service providers maintain billing systems that allow the mobile data service providers to charge customers for the mobile data services that they use. The systems that facilitate customer billing are maintained by the mobile data service and can be accessed by authorized requestors. Conventional mobile data services maintain systems for compiling billing records for their customers.
General Packet Radio Service/Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (GPRS/UMTS) is a mobile data service that is available to users of GSM mobile phones. In GPRS/UMTS networks, a gateway support node (e.g., GGSN) generates billing records called Call Detail Records (G-CDRs). The G-CDR contains the usage information for various events for a specific PDP context of the user. A user can do multiple different services on the same packet data protocol (PDP) contexts. However, with standard G-CDR there is no way to do differential billing for the services since it does not have any service specific information in it.
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